Hmmm.....I'm not going to write the movie review for "Lost in Translation" by Bill Murray (it's a good one though), yet an exciting / boring one, DNS, or Domain Name System.
First of all, Internet needs translation, lots of translation, from numbers to names, or vice versa. That's what DNS designed for.
DNS (RFC 1034, 1035) was originally composed by Prof. Jon Postel in the early 80's to handle "names" to "numbers" tranlation over the Internet. That said, all you need to remember is something like "www.chiao.info" or "www.yahoo.com", instead of a number string like "211.34.11.65". Statistics shown that up to last month there are about 63 million domain names registered under +250 different categories (like .com/.org/.info, or .tw/.jp/.cn), and the number grows steadily even after the dot-com crash.
Back in the 80's, the DNS was simply a text file. The translation works were easy since if the rules changed or the number-to-name pointers needed to be updated, all Jon did was to overwrite that text file. Today, hundreds of millions requests per hour are made and resolved through 13 root servers (mostly in the US, and Japan has the M-root server) and nearly 100 mirror servers (Taiwan has one F mirror in TWIX) around the world. The fact is more than 600 million people, like you and I, who also use Internet on daily basis to compose email, shop online, and do many other things by typing the web address in the browser.
So sometimes you get lost in translation....Experts will tell you many good reasons why you get lost, wrong DNS setting, mis-direction by stupid registry rules, domain name hijacking by some back-door programs, request time-out/no response, etc. My concern is much more about the impact brought in by emerging technologies / standards such as Internationalized Domain Name (or IDN), ENUM, and the ONS, or Object Naming Services for RFID. Those applications, in a foreseeable future, give 10 times more headache to existing DNS infrastructure.
No blame on the technologies because you don't stop invention because of out-dated scopes or rules. But it's time to worry about finding the pain-killer (for the headache)! Just think about how many calls or product codes flowing around the Internet per second which they all demand the services of DNS. What we will be dealing with is not just lost in translation, but loss in revenues and valuable information...once it's gone, it's gone.
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